The Road Untraveled
by kusegoto
Summary: (Мор. Утопия / Pathologic) There's a history you're not a part of. There's a way you can view it, if you opened your mind. Stakh Rubin and Mark Immortell from Pathologic 2.


_**A/N:** this is half a mark mood piece, half speculation on protagonist rubin._

_there's no intense trigger warnings, but the mild gore tag is for mark mishandling corpses (again!)_

* * *

For a while, he didn't sleep. Now, he can't.

Remarkably, for an evening in this town, the air doesn't choke him. It is thick with grass and dust, and he can smell the distant torches of warning fires, yet he takes slow and steady breaths in and feels his shoulders rest. The heavy air is comforting after such a long sleep, like a well-made coat for the winter. Stakh crosses the threshold between the Marrow and the Theatre Square. He can feel the town shift.

His shoulders ache from the firm mattress and the heavy bag weighing down his left arm. Stakh draws close the leather strap, feeling the clicking of glass bottles and vials jostling against his hip. The stone roads, winding and coiling, shift from older brick into newer, miracle-thinking architecture created by the Kains. Even the earth holds the rocks differently, flattened by hand instead of trodden with foot.

It takes him some time to travel to the hospital-theatre. Before this last week, he hadn't been there since he was a boy, maybe since Burakh was still among the townsfolk as a son and not a butcher. The sun has settled completely, hiding behind the crest of the earth.

The lights are on. There is a mattress thrown outside, covered in leaves from the square's trees, stained deep with old brown blood. The sickness does not linger for long inside the beds, but he can't say he's surprised they're disposing of one so tainted. Maybe it'll be stolen by morning, or stripped of its cleanest cloth for bandages.

Stakh shoulders open the door with an arm over his face. He braces for the familiar waft of stale, unwashed bodies.

The foyer is cramped. They have started to put people right by the doors. Families and lonely victims and orphaned children alike, resting in one of the lesser contaminated hallways of the building. There were fewer people when he was here, days ago. Some of them are awake, staring at the wall, at him, at their neighbour. Some of them may not be sleeping after all. None speak. He is mindful not to step on anyone, regardless.

They are meant to turn the lights off when the final orderly leaves, with no one to count the remaining living until morning. Tonight, one of the newly set bulbs that dangle from the stage ceiling sways in a wind that doesn't exist, bathing the operating table in blue light. There is a man, healthy, standing on the stage, circling one of the bodies. He's humming.

Stakh doesn't say anything as he approaches the foot of the stage until he sees the man is touching the body. "You shouldn't be here."

"Shouldn't? Perhaps. But I am." The man rests a cane over his shoulder. He thinks he's seen him before. "Isn't that door meant to be locked?"

Is that his way of saying he broke in? "Yes. It is. I thought you weren't returning until the disease was eradicated."

Mark Immortell offers Rubin a moments look with a smile no one could trust, before lowering his head and looking at the body once more. It is, was, a young man, no older than twenty, with heavily sunken eyes and an emaciated shape. He is clothed in a long shirt and heavy slacks, and yet Rubin can see how large the size became on the man before he passed. He doesn't think he likes how Immortell admires the corpse, tilting its head beneath the blueish light. His touch is clinical, but it is still a dead body, and Mark Immortell is still a living being.

"I never made any statement like that. Perhaps you're just mistaken — or were wrongly informed?" Immortell tuts his answer. "What brings you here?"

"I'm a doctor. I couldn't sleep." Rubin walks up the flanking stairs, but doesn't look at Immortell any further. He walks past the corpses, one standing and one laying down, and leaves his heavy bag on one of the covered tables filled with tools. "You can't help me."

"I never offered."

"Why are you touching the bodies?"

"We can go all night, passing the conversation back and forth between each other." Immortell swings his cane down to the stage floor, leaning forward on it and angling it at a side most men would topple over against. "I don't think either of us wants to answer any questions. I don't blame you. You're known to be rather stubborn."

Stakh lifts free three bottles of a murky beige medicine. Supposedly discovered by Dankovsky. "I don't know what you could possibly mean."

"Dry, too. I thought the week was going to forget about you."

He pauses at the vials of morphine. Donations from the Saburovs. He remains thankful he wasn't present for that conversation between orderlies and Alexander. "Forgotten?"

"You were saved by a miracle."

"I wasn't saved."

"You've avoided a mark on your head, haven't you?"

Stakh finally looks over his shoulder. "What do you know—"

"Everything, Stanislav." Immortell smiles, and tips his chin downward. The blue light plays with his features, shadows where bones aren't jutting out. "What will I do with it? Nothing."

"I don't believe you."

Immortell angles his head, glancing down at the corpse. He might be pointedly avoiding meeting Rubin's furious look, or the fist he keeps around a knife, buried far under the medicine and salves. "Do you, don't you? I'm sure if you made quick work of me, you could hide me among the dead to be carted out tomorrow. I don't think the earth would quite like me. It seems to dislike literal thinkers."

He lifts his hand to his throat. He drags his index finger along the offered skin, and makes a slick-sounded noise with his tongue, like cutting through cattle.

"One fine cut, right under the chin! From what I've seen, you have no problem with breaking taboo to get some progress going."

Maybe Dankovsky's been entertaining his theatrics. From what little Stakh knows of the theatre's director, he favours cryptic tongue and wordplay. Rubin doesn't have the patience for that. Instead, he pulls free the scalpel from his bag, sharp and clean if any blood, and presses his thumb to the flat edge.

Mark sees his threat. His eyes narrow and his smile stays wide, pulled tight over his teeth. Rubin looks as if he is considering his suggestion, as if he could bring himself to cut a possible hanging thread. There couldn't possibly be any way for a man rooted in the court of the Kains to have an ear by the earth. Couldn't at all. And still, Stakh considers.

"I'm afraid we don't have all night for you to make your decision," Mark eventually says.

"Of course we do," Stakh replies.

"I've a rehearsal. We're due to begin soon."

"Where the hell are you going to find the space for that?"

"In here, of course. We practise. Have you?"

Rubin doesn't look at him. Leaving the scalpel in his bag, he walks from the operating table, pulls free one of the white sheets folded in the cabinet, and begins to unfold it. He hears the tap of shoes across the stage, following him.

"He'll be buried by dawn," Rubin murmurs, leading the sheet towards the table, head bowed to ignore Mark beside him.

"If there's room to offer. I've heard it's cold underground, and there are too many bodies." Mark turns to look at him. He doesn't seem like he needs his cane much tonight, still swung over his shoulder. "No autopsy tonight? What, were you just going to _write?"_

Rubin stops before the partition that divides the table and the morgue. He closes his eyes, and presses his teeth together.

It was stifling in his apartment. The room was stale and heavy and he could feel Burakh watching him, perched on a chair in every corner, lamenting the reality of truth like a poet without a verse. Tasting a deadly night's air is preferable.

"Perhaps I was. I didn't come to talk to you. Get lost."

Rubin moves past the partition. The light has changed from cold blue to sickly yellow. The body is missing. Where the dead young man once laid now rests a figure in a white mask, hand cast over their head, a knee up. At their feet stands a similar figure, gesturing to their pantomime of grief.

"We _will_ talk, and we will watch." Mark strides past him, briskly. Rubin balks at the table. "I want to know something: what have you created?"

"Nothing," he replies. Mark laughs, low and unimpressed.

"What have you _made?_ What have you _done?_ Have you never taken a pencil to paper and brought to life a dream? Have you never placed blocks together and saw a shape? You are not such a hollow mind, Warden! There is more, there is a beyond that rests inside, waiting for purchase."

Mark takes his cane, and points it towards his frozen accomplice. "But literal artistic integrity does not answer for your own role. Not entirely, but not at all. There is more than solid thinking."

Rubin, with the sheet now dropped to the floor, steps forward. "I'm not a philosopher. I am a scholar, but I refused to talk mysticism with my teacher."

"One doesn't exist without the other. You cannot procure medical truths without first considering if someone chose the right colour of blood cell."

With folded arms, Rubin eyes Mark. "Fine. I'm not a painter. That is true."

"What do you call your work with a blade?"

"Surgery."

"I don't mean to detract our time with artistic conversation — but let us indulge. You do not create with a knife; you discover. But who made the blood, the fat, the flesh? Are you discovering another's work?"

"Bodies are the work of what makes us. The creator, of if it is a god or natural biology, is irrelevant." A frown. "Are you asking if I believe in God?"

"I'm asking if you know where blood begins and ends," Mark replies, with a smile.

Rubin looks at the figures. They don't move, not to breathe or sway or change their position. Their bones jut beneath their suits, but he's unsure if they are wearing suits, or if those are really bones.

"Blood begins in the heart of the mother bull, according to the legends," he confesses.

"Again, caught on your own perception! I don't care about legends. I care about _possibility."_

"And what makes that different than what Kinsmen speak of?! Neither your reality or theirs answers where the first drop of blood came from — only how it flows!"

"There!" Mark gasps, arms wide to mirror the standing masked individual. "Our first answer! Yes, neither speak for where blood begins; only to where to moves. But more than blood moves. Time moves, even if it had to be invented. Our _existence_ is moving. It changes, it evolves."

The figure laying in their dramatic death lifts their body, a hand clutching their mask's forehead. They rise as if to represent an aching dream; their partner lowers to their knees, clutching where a heart might be.

"Where does it go?" asks Rubin.

"We die. Look at the shade; it dies of a failing heart."

"And who is rising? Not another person, I assure you. It is the same man."

Rubin rolls his eyes and shuts them tight. "That better not be because they look the damn same."

Mark's laugh is once again not entertained. "Man must understand where the first well was dug to change. What is a river if not an obstacle to cross?"

"Even if it flows red with blood?" He pauses. "Why not follow the river to find its end — or beginning?"

Mark's eyes light up, like the callous grey was swept free. "Now, you understand."

"No, I don't. It's just a possibility."

"That, you are correct. It is a possibility, a chance one could take to understand. You could follow the river. You could also cross. Or, you could leap in, and drown."

"Your body might find its way to the end. Does that count?"

"If only we could accept dying as you cross the finish line." Mark lowers his cane to the floor, and knocks its heel against the wood with a loud _thud_. The light goes out.

Rubin hears the silence disappear. The buzzing of flies, the groans of people. He looks around in the solid black before the crystal blue returns. So does the cadaver. So does Mark, at the centre of the stage, looking to the sickbeds.

He lowers and picks up the sheet he dropped. When Stakh approaches the body, he cautiously looks for seams in its skin.

"There's a reason I didn't draft anything for you," Mark sighs as Rubin drags the sheet over the body.

"Don't 'draft' anything involving me. You hear me?" Rubin doesn't stare at Mark for long. "I'll be telling your Bachelor to quarantine you tomorrow, now that I know you're fondling the corpses."

Mark begins to hum. "Silly boy. He believes, and knows, where I am."

"Tell me where. I'll fetch for planks to bar your front door."

Rubin recognizes the hum as what the Kin children sing around the town, echoing a call to the marble nest. "Everywhere."


End file.
